Garda joins forces with North to snare illegal immigrants

Garda officers will soon be serving in Northern Ireland. Irish police officers from the Garda National Immigration Bureau are heading north to stem the flow of illegal immigrants using the 320-mile border to claim asylum in the Republic.

At least half a dozen Garda officers will join their colleagues in the PSNI at northern ports, harbours and airports. According to the latest figures from the Republic's Department of Justice, 80 per cent of illegal immigrants come to Ireland via Northern Ireland.

A senior officer in the Garda Siochana said the move follows a decision to deploy a dozen members of the force's National Immigration Bureau at Cherbourg, the main French port used by immigrants to sail to Ireland.

'If they are flying into Britain or coming via the ferries from the Continent, their last port of call before settling in southern Ireland is the North. They are coming into our state day in and day out through the border. So we need officers in the north working with our PSNI colleagues to gather intelligence and if needed stop the people smuggling via Northern Ireland,' he said yesterday.

Once in Northern Ireland, he said, immigrants find it easy to cross the border.

'Normally they will take a taxi at a northern port or airport and give the driver about £40, that's the going rate, and ask him to take them just across the border. Normally they don't go as far as Dublin. Any small town just over the frontier is good enough. Once inside our territory they can immediately claim asylum,' the officer added.

Asylum claims have rocketed over the past few years in the Republic. In 1992 there were only 39 such cases; a decade later there are more than 10,000 annually.

Ireland was once shaped by emigration with millions of people leaving for Britain, North America, Australia and New Zealand. In the 80 years after the famine more than four and a half million men, women and children left to build new lives abroad.

But in the twenty-first century the republic has become a haven for both political refugees and economic migrants. Between 1991 and 2000 more than 180,000 people moved to Ireland. mmigration has transformed whole areas of Dublin and turned the capital into a multiracial, poly-ethnic city. The bulk of the immigrants come from Nigeria and the Balkans.

With immigration has come a sharp rise in racial incidents across the Republic over the past two years. And although overtly racist parties have not fared well in Irish elections of late, candidates in mainstream parties who have hyped up fears about mass immigration have enjoyed electoral success.